70 facts about India to mark the 70th anniversary of its partition

Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi addressing the crowds at celebrations of the country's Independence day at Red Fort in New DelhiAP Photo/Manish Swarup

India is celebrating its 70th anniversary - an event shot through
with both national pride and memories of the trauma of the
partition that created it.

In keeping with that major event, which is being celebrated and
remembered across the world, here are 70 facts to mark the
anniversary - from its horrifying beginnings to its more stunning
achievements.

Partition is the dividing line struck through the Indian
subcontinent to create the Muslim nation of Pakistan which then
included what is now Bangladesh.

The decision to divide India came against the backdrop of the
Second World War and the drive for Indian independence - the
Crown was losing control of its jewel. On 20 February 1947
British prime minister Clement Attlee said British rule would end
before June 1948.

Nobody really knows why it happened so quickly - Lord Louis
Mountbatten, who had arrived just months before to serve as
Britain's last viceroy, decided in June 1947 that power would be
transferred within a couple of months. That was 10 months earlier
than expected. It's thought that the hurry might have been to
force the two groups taking part in negotiations to sort
themselves out.

Both India and Pakistan became new, independent states in
August 1947. Pakistan celebrates its independence day on 14
August, a day before India - this timing allowed Lord Mountbatten
to attend both ceremonies.

On the night of 14 August 1947 - as the two countries were
preparing to be split apart - Lord Mountbatten was reportedly
entertained by a screening of the Bob Hope film My Favourite
Brunette. That was despite the fact that he was still officially
looking after a country (or two) that were descending into fatal
chaos.

He was far from the first Viceroy to keep to eccentric habits
as India was headed for chaos. Lord Linlithgow, who served in the
job from 1936 to 1943, liked to walk into dinner each evening to
a band playing 'The Roast Beef of Old England', an especially
unusual choice in a country that venerates the cow.

It even took until two days after partition - 17 August, 1947
- for the borders of Pakistan to be drawn up and established.

When those borders arrived, they were as divisive as they
might appear. Following work by a British-led commission, the
Radcliffe Line was drawn down map - though it was supposed to
split the country in such a way as to keep Muslims in Pakistan
and Hindus and Sikhs in India, it cut communities in two and
forced people to move between the borders.

In 1941, Karachi was 47.6 per cent Hindu, for instance - by
the end of the decade, almost all of those people had fled. Delhi
was designated the capital of India but one one-third Muslim, and
the same thing happened there.

That displacement and movement led to horrific outbreaks of
violence and death. Governments hadn't been equipped to cope with
them, and in large parts of both countries the entire population
of certain religions were wiped out.

British soldiers were stationed in the country, but were told
not to do anything. They had been instructed only to act to save
British lives.

The effects are still being felt today. The border is still
difficult to cross, and families are left either side of it with
no way of reuniting.

For all that, the Muslim population of India is still large,
at 160 million people. That makes India the place with the third
largest population of Muslims, after Indonesia and Pakistan.

And the lines are still unclear. Both countries - claim the
Himalayan region of Kashmir, for instance.

The dispute over Kashmir adds tension to the relationship
between the two states. They have fought three wars since 1947.

Those wars are especially worrying nowadays, given the fact
that both countries have nuclear weapons.

And the borders are still being contested in such wars. In
1971, the two countries fought over East Pakistan, which seceded
to become Bangladesh.

All of that work to decide where the countries would be split
was done by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who hadn't actually
been to India before the Partition process began.

He is one of the central controversial figures of Partition.
But certainly the most disputed is the decisions of Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan who is often hailed as a hero in
the country he created but a villain in the one that he split it
from.

Partition was shocking in its specifics, with individual
families being torn apart and separated. But it is shocking in
its sheer scale, too: more than 10 million people were displaced
during the transition, making it easily one of the biggest
movements of people in history.

Up to two million people died during the move. Many of them
simply went missing - including huge numbers of people who left
western India but never knowingly arrived in Pakistan.

The movement of communities, especially in Punjab and Bengal,
led to numerous other crimes. People were kidnapped, forced to
convert and killed, and tens of thousands of women were subjected
to sexual violence, and often murdered after.

Partition didn't happen immediately, at least not in clear
ways. For instance, until 1948 Pakistan used Indian bank notes,
which had "Pakistan" stamped over them. They would go on to be
replaced by Pakistani rupees in 1948.

Similar changes happened during partition to the flag. The
Indian flag's three horizontal bands represent courage, truth and
peace, and faith and chivalry. A spinning wheel used to be seen
in the middle - but after partition, a Buddhist wheel of life was
added to the centre instead.

India's other major symbol, the Bengal tiger, was once seen
throughout the country. But they are gradually dying out, and
there are now fewer than 4,000 of them left in the wild.

Gurinder Chadha, whose own family were forced to flee their
homes due to the Partition, examined its painful effects this
year in her film Viceroy's House. Chadha's film leaps into the
midst of this conflict, specifically in the arrival of Lord Louis
Mounbatten to Viceroy's House in March, 1947. He was instructed
to fill in the role as the last Viceroy to India, tasked with
ensuring a smooth transfer of imperial power.

India makes more than 1,100 films per year - twice as many as
Hollywood. And though Bollywood is famous, it's only a small
amount of that total: it refers specifically to Mumbai's Hindi
film industry, which only makes about 200 films a year. Though
its immense output makes it the world's most productive film
industry, its audience aren't such big fans, and fewer people go
to the cinema each year than in other countries like the US,
Japan and the UK.

The first Indian to win an Academy Award was Bhanu Athaiya in
1983, for designing the costumes in Richard Attenborough's
Gandhi. Ravi Shankar was nominated that same year for the film's
score, but did not win. Satyajit Ray, director of Pather Panchali
and Charulata, is the only Indian to have received an Honorary
Academy Award.

The Ravanahatha is believed by some to be the ancestor to the
violin. Its sound box is usually either a gourd, a halved coconut
shell or a hollowed-out cylinder of wood, with a membrane of
stretched goat or other hide. The neck is then produced out wood
or bamboo, with the strings created out of gut, hair or steel.

India's theatre tradition goes back at least 5000 years
starting out in narrative form comprised of its main elements,
singing and dancing. The plots were initially based on history,
folk tales and legends with the emphasis placed on visual
representation as opposed to vocal. Its representation of the
'epic' is what German playwright and director Brecht used to
evolve his own creative theories surrounding the art form.

The highest-grossing Indian film of all time is the
Disney-produced Dangal, a 2016 biographical sports drama directed
by Nitesh Tiwari. The film stars Aamir Khan as an amateur
wrestler who trains his daughters to become Commonwealth Game
medalists. It's the fifth highest grossing non-English film of
all time with takings of over ₹2,000 crore (£238.8m).

Television was first introduced into India in September 1959
but had only one national channel for over 30 years: DD National.
The channel was part of All India Radio studio in Delhi - where
it stayed until 1965 - and began life as an experimental telecast
with just a small transmitter and makeshift studio. It began
regular transmission as DD1 Channel in 1982.

India actually has the world's largest film industry,
producing more than 1,100 films each year - twice as many as the
United States, 10 times more than the UK, and only just ahead of
Nigeria. Despite what you're probably thinking, only 200 of those
are Bollywood films (Hindi), the majority being made in both
Tamil and Telugu. In terms of box-office, though, India comes
sixth, behind the USA, China, Japan, UK and France.

The people of India are the world's biggest bookworms,
reading on average 10.42 hours a week, almost twice as much time
as the average Briton. As a result, Indians spend far less time
watching TV and listening to radio. According to the 2013 survey,
Thailand come a close second, while Korea and Japan read the
least of all.

Over half the books sold in India are in English, making the
country the second largest marketplace for books in English in
the world, only falling behind the United States. Of the
remaining 45 percent, 35 percent are in Hindi, while the rest are
in other Indian languages. Overall, India is the sixth-largest
book market in the world and was estimated, last year, to be
worth ₹26,060 crore (£3.124 billion).

During the 1800s, while under British rule, the people of
India began using theatre as a means to protest the colonial
rule. In 1876, the British Raj implemented the Dramatic
Performances Act which dictated that each play would have to meet
certain criteria set out by the government, the main one being
they don't excite feelings of disaffection towards the law. Even
after Independence, India partially kept the law, the new
government keeping some control over the performing arts.
However, come 1993, the act was labelled obsolete.

India's first election took place in 1952, by an Electoral
Commission that was established just two years after
independence.

It was a progressive election, encouraged by its first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He made sure that the election
happened as early as possible - and that it didn't use systems
like the electoral college, and didn't require that people had
property, or were men, to vote.

That was a tough ask: the size of the electorate was 176
million. To allow all of those people to vote, the country had to
build 224,000 polling booths, fitted out with a total of two
million steel boxes.

Now the electorate is four and a half times as big, with 814
million people getting a chance to vote. And there are 1.2
billion people in the country in total, who live in 29 states and
seven union territories.

More of those people have access to a phone than they do a
toilet.

Between them, they speak 22 official languages - though the
national langurs are Hindi and English - and hundreds of
dialects.

India's calendar is divided up into six seasons: summer,
autumn, winter and spring, but also the summer monsoon and winter
monsoon.

Cricket is the country's most popular support, after it was
introduced during British rule. But it's not officially the
national sport - which is actually hockey.

The national fruit of India is the mango. (And it's also the
national fruit of Pakistan, as well as being the national tree of
Bangladesh.)

The national bird of India is the Indian peacock. It was
chosen in 1963.

The country even has its own national microbe. It's the
Lactobacillus delbrueckii, and was picked in 2012 during a
biodiversity conference that was held in Hyderabad. It was picked
out by schoolchildren.

India uses the Rupee as its national currency, which is
issued by the Reserve Bank of India. The symbol, which looks like
the letter "R" is derived from the Devanagari consonant "र", but
Latin letter was adopted in 2010.

The Indian economy is 27 times larger than it was at the time
of Partition in 1947.

India average annual GDP growth rate since 2006 has been 7
per cent.

There were 420 million people in India prior to in 1946. That
fell to 350 million at Partition. Today there are 1.3 billion.

A sixth of Indians - 218 million people - are estimated to
live in extreme poverty today.

India has more individual people in extreme poverty than in
China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia combined.

Indian GDP per capita (at Purchasing Power Parity) in 2016
was $4,900 - 12 per cent of the UK's GDP per capita.

The dollar value of the Indian economy this year is $2.25
trillion. It is expected by the IMF to overtake the dollar value
of the UK economy in 2018.

India is the world's biggest tea producer. (And it's also by
a long way it's most popular drink.)

And - as you might expect from how liberally they are used in
the food - India produces 70 per cent of the world's spices.

But London has more Indian restaurants than even the
country's biggest cities. The biggest Indian restaurant in the
world is also in the UK.

India is the most vegetarian place in the world, with the
fewest meat-eaters. (Luxembourg are the biggest carnivores.)

Despite being so large, all of India uses one single
timezone.

But that size does also give it the second biggest train
network in the world, which is also the biggest civilian
employer, with 16 million members of staff.

It also has the third biggest road networking the world, with
1.9 million miles of (often very traffic-heavy) road.

That traffic has led to New Delhi's air becoming easily the
most polluted in the world. Just breathing it for one day during
Diwali is like smoking 113 cigarettes.

India has the most post offices in the world: more than
150,000. That might not be surprising, given it's not far off
having the most people. So here's a bonus shocking fact: India
also has a floating post office, which is on Dal Lake in
Srinagar.

The country is known for the heights it has climbed in
international cricket. And sometimes those heights are a little
more literal than you'd expect. India's Himachal Pradesh region
is home to Chail, a hill station that was once used as a summer
retreat by the Maharaja of Patiala, and still today includes the
highest cricket ground in the world, 2,250 metres up.

And that's not the only claim that India has to being very,
very tall. Khardung La - a pass that can be found in the state of
Jammu and Kashmir - is also said to be the tallest motor able
road in the world. But unfortunately that doesn't appear to be
true: satellite observations and other work have proven that the
pass is slightly less high than previously thought, and that
another Indian road might in fact be the tallest one.

India is home to the man with the world's biggest family,
Ziona Chana. That consists of a full 180 people, which includes
39 wives and 94 children. And Ziona has expressed interest in
getting married to even more women.

The game today known as snakes and ladders began in India,
and was originally called Moksha Patam. Inside its rules can be
seen some of the philosophies that are part of Indian thought to
this day, particularly in its emphasis on destiny and karma.
(When it was imported into England, the Victorians changed some
of the virtues and vices to suit what they suggested were more
western values.)

India is thought to be the birthplace of chess, too - where
it was played as much as 2,500 years ago. Its early form was
known as chaturanga, a name that referred to the four divisions
of the military - infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots.
(That's pawns, knights, bishops and rooks, as we know them
today.)

The Kumbh Mela is a huge Hindu religious festival that's held
every 12 years in India. It is regularly referred to as the
biggest gathering of people in the world, though it can be very
difficult to actually work out the size of such a huge gathering.
As such, it's not clear how many people attend - but it's in the
tens of millions.